Note 1378 — Chapter VI · (continued 3)

It is worth while to note Virginia Farrer’s map of Virginia, given in Vol. III. p. 465, for the strange belief which with some people prevailed in England in 1651, that the Pacific coast was at the foot of the western slope of the Alleghanies,—a belief which was represented in 1625 by Master Briggs in Purchas (vol. iii. p. 852), where he speaks of the south sea “on the other side of the mountains beyond our falls, which openeth a free and fair passage to China.”